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The Jewish denominations within the Ottoman Empire—Romaniots, Mustaʿribūn, Sephardim, Ashkenazim, and Karaites—all had their own distinctive naming practices, but the differences between them were more pronounced in the earlier period, from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, than later. Starting in the seventeenth century, Italian (and later some French) Jews, collectively known as francos , began to settle in the empire. Their naming practices were not much different from those of Jews already living in the empire, but their family names, as will be noted below, disclosed their origins.The main sources for Jewish names in the Ottoman Empire are responsa collections and registries of divorce cases; the latter included sections devoted to the proper spelling of names because of the halakhic importance of exactitude in matters of divorce. Additionally, there are personal and communal correspondence, registrie…